(Jesse Pearson's article was originally published in the National Association of Independent Schools on November 11, 2024)
Few activities are more mutually gratifying for teachers and learners than the classroom read-aloud. Walk into any lower elementary classroom—or the children’s section of your local library—during story time, and you are likely to see formerly wiggly youngsters sitting in rapt attention, bodies bizarrely calm, listening intently.
When a teacher pauses to ask about a character’s motivation, the impact of the story’s setting, or what might happen next, eager hands thrust skyward. Every student has an idea to share, a prediction to make, or an insight that can no longer be contained. This experience demonstrates the engagement that education scholars believe is key to high academic achievement and successful learning outcomes.
A 2018 Gallup study, “School Engagement Is More Than Just Talk,” reveals that nearly 75% of students are highly engaged in their learning by the end of elementary school. However, this level of high engagement drops to about 50% by middle school and to 33% by high school. This raises the question: Why do teachers stop reading out loud when students find it so engaging?
Teachers stop reading to students for the same reason that parents stop cutting their kid’s food for them. At some point, they have to learn to do it for themselves. However, this response is built on a false premise: that reading aloud to middle or even high school students distracts them from developing essential reading skills.
Reading independently is crucial for developing valuable academic skills, such as identifying the main idea of a passage, finding text evidence, accurately responding to prompts on standardized tests, and interpreting figurative language. However, I believe that the joy of being read to does not take away from the skill of reading. Further, reading aloud has the power to help students develop a love of books beyond school.
Why Do I Read Aloud to My Students?
I began this school year as a seventh-grade language arts teacher by reading C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew almost entirely aloud. Notably, in the age of leveled reading, this book is well within the skill range of my entire class. Few, if any of them would have struggled with it. So why not have them read it themselves?
Some Students Won’t Read
Some students may rely on SparkNotes to answer comprehension questions or mumble through small group discussions. They might leave blank the questions that require text evidence or select a random quote just to show that they can perform the skill. Even at the middle school where I teach, there have always been students who simply don’t complete their assignments. This decline in engagement is a concern for educators and parents alike. While it’s easy to blame smartphones, social media, or the repercussions of the pandemic this isn’t new—any honest teacher from 2024 or even 1954 would recognize that.
It's often overlooked that there is a tendency to blame a student’s lack of engagement on the student. This mindset can be tempting because addressing the issue would require us to reconsider our teaching methods, adjust our pedagogy, or even redefine educational goals and desired outcomes.
So Students Don’t Associate Reading with Work
Parents used to plead for help in rekindling their children’s love for reading. “She used to love reading, but sometime around sixth grade, she seemed to lose interest.” For a long time, my response was the same: “When did you get her a phone?” I was all but certain that the moment the child had access to YouTube, TikTok, group chats, or any other dopamine-fueled injection of instant gratification was when they lost interest in reading. While I’m still suspicious of the impact of smartphones on reading habits, this was also a convenient answer. It placed the onus for the child’s lack of interest in reading squarely on the parents’ shoulders.
The more insidious truth is that children typically stop reading when they no longer see books as a source of entertainment and start to view them as a chore. This shift is likely due to the influence of schools and teachers.
In the past, I assigned my seventh graders to complete their reading independently, usually as homework. I’d give them written comprehension questions or ask for chapter summaries. In class, we’d discuss the previous night’s reading, annotate the text, and write an essay that synthesized all of these skills. However, seeing those tasks written down like that, I even get bored. I can only imagine how my students feel performing them.
The truth is that treating reading as work can lead students to stop engaging with the text as soon as they get the information they need to demonstrate the skill being assessed. Every poem, chapter, article, or book then becomes something to be endured and consumed to complete an assignment. In this sense, a book is like a swimming pool. We teach children to read just as we teach them to swim. For many years, they enjoy splashing, playing, and jumping off the diving board. Then one day, we put lane lines in the pool and tell them to swim laps. While some kids may embrace the challenge, most are likely to stay out of the water.
Reading Aloud Keeps Them Engaged
When I read aloud to my 12- and 13-year-old students, they become immersed in the drama of the book. They express intense feelings about the characters. They recall in extraordinary detail moments from earlier chapters that suddenly make sense. They gasp when a shocking twist is revealed. They think critically about the deeper meaning of the story. They make spontaneous connections between the text and other texts, the world around them, or their own experiences. In short, they demonstrate nearly all of the skills they will need to have success in high school and college humanities classes. Above all, when I reach the end of a chapter, they want me to keep reading. I can’t get them out of the pool.
Below are illustrations my seventh graders created, inspired by a read-aloud of C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew. They are a lip-balm tree, a sushi tree, and a boba tree.
Changing the Relationship Between Students and Books
An October 2024 article in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” revealed an alarming trend: Students entering elite universities often complete high school without ever reading an entire novel. As texts become a means to an end or a pipeline for skill acquisition, it’s reasonable to conclude that consuming a larger number of shorter texts will result in a higher number of skills gained. The logic follows that acquiring more skills will enhance academic performance, which will result in more desirable educational outcomes, including college admission. The article suggests that many public high school students are assigned only short passages, chapters of larger works, or curated articles expressly for these reasons.
It’s easy then to assume that the reason students aren’t reading books is because they aren’t being asked to. But I’d argue that something deeper is happening. Schools have slowly and inexorably changed the relationship between students and books. Reading (or being read to) is no longer seen as an act that has intrinsic value, a joy worth pursuing for its own sake. By reading aloud to older students, I’m exploring what it means to decouple these things, to periodically break the link between reading and working.
My students will continue reading texts on their own. They will consume short stories, poems, nonfiction articles, and even entire novels. I hope that when reading inevitably becomes onerous, they will remember the times, not so long ago when their teacher read them a story. They will recall moments when they ventured into the mysterious land of Narnia, cheered for Frodo in the depths of Mt. Doom, or gasped at the sight of Boo Radley behind a door.
“A good story, well told.” That is how my father described the books I cherished as a child. I’ve fallen in love with many books since then, but the stories I loved most are the ones he read to me. I am confident that reading aloud will help my students come to love books as I do. At least, that’s the story I’m telling myself.
Author
Jesse Pearson, Middle School Humanities Teacher & High School Placement Counselor.